Inherent Vice in Narcos and Public Morals

In the first scene of the new show Public Morals, which premiered last night on TNT, we see a pool hall confrontation between Sean O’Bannon (Austin Stowell), a young vice cop with a decent heart and a hot head, and his father, Mr. O (Timothy Hutton), a sort of middle manager gangster with c-suite crime lord aspirations.

Mr. O, as we quickly learn, also has a bit of a wife-beating problem, which his son is not going to stand for anymore. “I wanted to wish you congratulations,” Sean spits at his dad. “You’re still undefeated against Mom.” Mr. O takes a pool cue to Sean’s head, Sean punches his dad in the eye, and Mr. O slaps his son. “Get out of here,” Mr. O says. “Go home to your mother. Have her teach you to throw a punch.” Escorted out by his dad’s goonies, Sean shouts back, “Next time I’ll kill you Pop, I swear!”

By the end of the first episode, Mr. O is dead—though by the hand of another man’s son—and the simmering intergenerational skirmishes of Public Morals are officially underway. Set in sixties New York City, in the west-side neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, Public Morals, created by and starring Edward Burns (it’s also executive-produced by Steven Spielberg), feels like what might happen if you mashed up the social milieu of Burns’s early film The Brothers McMullen with the noir-ish underworld of Sin City and added in some of the matter-of-fact grit of NYPD Blue.

On its face this is a relatively conventional hardboiled detective story about the intersection between organized criminals and the vice cops who enable them, taking a cut of profits in return for turning a blind eye to the victimless crimes of card-playing and prostitution. “The people of our good city like to have a lot of fun,” Burns, as officer Terry Muldoon, explains to Jimmy Shea, new to the squad. “We do what has been done for the past hundred years. We manage it for the city. Think of us as the landlords: If you want to be in business, you’ve gotta pay your rent.”

The show gets its energy from its wonderful character actors: the wheezy-voiced, fast-talking Burns, who gives the no-bullshit Muldoon a sense of cheerful relatability; sleazy, twitchy Kevin Corrigan as Mr. O’s right-hand man, Smitty; the wonderful Brian Dennehy as Joe Patton, head of the Irish Mob; Timothy Hutton as the striving, take-no-prisoners Mr. O; and Michael Rapaport as the mushy-hearted veteran detective Charlie Bullman.

While the underground dealings of gangsters and cops give this show its framework, Public Morals is really about fathers and sons, actual and figurative. Patriarchal conflicts abound and threaten to disturb the tentative order of this insular community. Muldoon is troubled by both his own father, a retired cop who wants him to personally take on the investigation into Mr. O’s assassination (Mr. O happens to be married to Muldoon’s mother’s half sister), and his tweenage son, whose middle-school goofing off may be an sign of latent criminal tendencies. When Mr. O is assassinated, Sean contends with his joy at the death of the father he hated, while Smitty questions whether or not to take over the books of his dead boss, also something of a father figure. And mob overlord Joe Patton must contend with his own son, Rusty, a reckless thug recently released from prison, with an enormous chip on his shoulder and a very different way of doing business from his old man.

Aging, fat, and grown accustomed to a veneer of bourgeoisie respectability that may cloud his criminal judgment (he sent his granddaughter, we learn, to the upper-crust girl’s school Spence), Patton is a bit of a sitting duck for a savvy upstart. But in the absence of Mr. O, who will that be? And can the crooked yet mostly well-intentioned cops of the vice squad keep control in the midst of a brewing power struggle?

“The times are a changing,” Mr. O says to Muldoon shortly before he is killed. “We don’t need anybody rocking the boat right now,” Muldoon replies. “Everybody is making money, and nobody is getting hurt.” Mr. O sets up a shot on the pool table. “It’s just that in my business,” he says, aiming, “sometimes, people get hurt.”

That’s the trouble with victimless crimes: As the accumulation of dead bodies in the early episodes of Public Morals demonstrates, wherever there’s dirty money to be made, violence is sure to follow.

That truism gets even more vivid illustration in Narcos, the new ten-episode, half-Spanish, half-English show from Netflix. (Season one is available to stream on Friday.) The first season of Narcos is a fictionalization of the story of the infamous Colombian drug lord, Pablo Escobar, king pin of the Medellín cartel. The brutality involved in the Colombian cocaine trade makes the violence of Public Morals look downright petty. (To drive the point home: The show forebodingly asserts in its first episode that Escobar would kill more than 1,000 cops over the course of his career.)

If Burns’s show centers on what happens to entrenched ways of doing business when a new generation of criminals and cops threaten the status quo, Narcos is about the brave new world of building a criminal hierarchy from the ground up. The show is mostly told from the point of view of the now-retired DEA agent Steve Murphy, who spent years on Escobar’s trail, and who also served as a technical consultant on the project, along with his former DEA partner Javier Peña.

Murphy, played by Boyd Holbrook, provides the sometimes heavy-handed voiceovers that drive this documentary-esque narrative forward. (The show splices in real footage and archival photographs of Escobar to establish that style, and an air of truth.) We begin in seventies Chile, a country that, we’re told, was well on its way to becoming the world’s foremost cocaine processing center, until the corrupt Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet rounded up his country’s drug dealers and executed almost all of them in one fell swoop. One man, who earned the nickname Cockroach, miraculously survived the shooting, escaped, and sneaked some cocaine out to Colombia, where he showed it to Escobar, already a smuggler. The rest is history.

Cockroach intends to sell cocaine in Colombia, but Escobar thinks bigger: “If it sells for ten bucks a gram here, what will it sell for in Miami?” Escobar introduces the drug to an American market, sending the powder on, or in, the bodies of drug mules traveling on commercial flights to Miami. Miamians quickly develop a taste for cocaine; as the trade ramps up, violence erupts around it. “There were thousands of murders in Miami and nobody cared,” declares Murphy, explaining that what eventually gets the attention of American politicians is not the flurry of drug-related violent crime, but rather the escalating quantity of American cash flowing into the pockets of Colombian drug dealers.

By the end of the first episode of Narcos, Murphy is on his way to Colombia with his wife and his cat in tow, naively gearing up to fight the Reagan-era drug war on the ground at its source. Escobar, in the meantime, has grown richer than God; he has so much cash that he begins burying it in the ground and eventually giving it away to the poor, a practice that complicates his public image. He’s both a vicious drug smuggler and a Robin Hood figure, among the richest men around, and somehow also a man of the people.

We know how this turns out: in real life, Escobar was shot to death by the Colombian national police in 1993. Even if you’re already familiar with the broad strokes of Escobar’s rise and fall, it’s worth watching Narcos to experience the textures of the Colombian drug trade at its ugliest. There’s something Tarantino-esque about the way Narcos revels in violence (and in sex, too). But even for the faint-of-heart, there’s a compelling reason to watch in Brazilian actor WagnerMoura’s nuanced portrayal of Escobar. Even playing a man famous for wanton murder, reckless womanizing, and fraternizing with known Nazi sympathizer Carlos Lehder, Moura brings Escobar’s humanity to the fore. When, for example, a few episodes in, Escobar pays his way into a congressional seat and is summarily ousted for concealing his criminal tendencies, we feel the drug lord’s sadness, his indignation and shame at being cast out from the hallowed halls of his country’s elite. We almost, actually, feel sorry for him.

It helps that we see shades of cartel lords’ unsavory behavior in the actions of the DEA agents. Peña sleeps with the same prostitutes as the narcos. He and Murphy regularly dole out bribes to the same police officers that the narcos keep on their payroll. And the DEA, we see again and again, aren’t above resorting to violence to secure intel when they need it.

It’s an ugly world out there, both shows remind us, no matter which side of the law you’re on. As Terry Muldoon, in a bit of dubious parenting, warns his wayward son: “The world is filled with assholes. I should know. I have to deal with them all the time at work. And I do not want to deal with one under my roof. It’s a fine line. It’s very hard to see sometimes. You and your friends, you’re out on the streets jerking around, having what seems like harmless fun, until one day you wake up on the wrong side of that line. You discover that you have joined the ranks of the imbeciles and the assholes, most likely to end up incarcerated.”